Law & Disorder —

You know the name, but just who were the Luddites?

Do you declare yourself a "Luddite" every time some new app or wireless device …

"You heroes of England who wish to have a trade Be true to each other and be not afraid Tho' Bayonet is fixed they can do no good As long as we keep up the Rules of General Ludd."

Not long ago I met a filmmaker friend for lunch in the Fisherman's Wharf area of San Francisco, where she was doing some work. She showed up in her sports car with her digital video gear and spent much of our meeting setting it up. At some point she got a call and took it on her BlackBerry. Toward the end of our conversation, I mentioned a new piece of software I had downloaded.

"I don't get that stuff," she nervously confided. "I'm such a Luddite."

One of the ironies of our time is that while most Americans have more machines and gadgets than ever, the term "Luddite" has become part of our lingua franca. An online critic calls a new play skeptical of cell phone culture a "luddites' manifesto." A writer for the New York Times boasts of his "luddite summer," in which he "tried not to Twitter." A graduate student wonders whether it is still "OK to be a luddite," as did the writer Thomas Pynchon almost a quarter of a century ago.

"We now live, we are told, in the Computer Age," Pynchon worried. "What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did?"

What's strange about this kind of talk is how divorced it is from the concerns of the poor unfortunates of two hundred years ago who actually were "The Luddites." We've got them down as a noble mob of anti-technology and anti-capitalist crusaders. But were they either of those things?

Only General Ludd . . .

The Luddites were weavers who had the bad luck to live in early nineteenth century Britain, most famously in the Nottinghamshire county of Robin Hood legend. They made leg stockings, first as apprentices and then hopefully as masters. They worked in villages and sold their wares to hosiery distributors who, in turn, sold them locally or shipped them off to markets across the British Isles, continental Europe, and the rest of the world.

Then a series of economic calamities shook their world. During the Napoleonic wars and its conflict with the United States in 1812, Britain lost access to continental European and American consumer markets. To add insult to economic injury, the clothing stylist Beau Brummell encouraged the London upper classes to wear trousers rather than stockings.

This reduced many parts of artisan England to near starvation; in response, weaver masters made the same blunder that farmers of the time often made. They overproduced, skimped on quality, and embraced labor-saving machines—which in turn cut the wages of thousands of stocking makers and put more of them out of work.

The weavers appealed for help and emergency relief, but the war with France painted any public outcry with the color of sedition. The workers could not vote, legally join unions, or in some cases even demonstrate in public. There was, however, one ancient means of registering discontent that artisans resorted to in desperate times: breaking or "Ludding" machines. Popular legend had it that one day a young slacker named Ned Ludd got sick of his job and stopped working. His boss managed to convince a judge that Ned should be whipped. The kid wasn't the sharpest pencil in the cup, and he smashed up his weaving machine in response.

Desperate, and inspired by this tale of Ned Ludd, between 1811 and 1817 thousands of stocking makers in five counties raised hell, destroying weaving frames, factories, and workshops. When they weren't trashing machinery, they robbed storehouses and rioted over food prices and supplies. All told, the Luddites destroyed property and machinery worth about �100,000. By the height of the rebellion, "Ned Ludd" had been promoted to mythical leader of the Luddites.

"Only General Ludd means the poor any good," his followers scrawled on the walls of public houses and taverns.

Full fashioned work

So what did the Luddites really believe in? The popular image of them as an anti-technology movement fumbles upon a close look at their lives. The stocking frame weaving machines that these artisans mastered were complicated devices that required hand and foot coordination. So were the shearing tools they used to cut their cloth.

Obviously, the Luddites whacked an impressive number of new labor-saving devices—"wide" weaving frames that could do the work of five stocking makers, and even bigger steam-powered factories that could replace entire artisan communities. But they just as often went after workshops with conventional machinery. The Luddites didn't oppose technology; they opposed the sudden collapse of their industry, which they blamed in part on new weaving machines, but just as often on cost-cutting workshops that still operated with more conventional equipment.

You also can't tag the Luddites simply as an anti-capitalism movement (although plenty of writers do). Their anonymously published poems and statements didn't cite the c-word—but, obviously, they made stockings for sale in the marketplace. What these artisans fought was a completely unregulated economy that regarded their destruction as a minor blot on the larger page of progress.

"Let the wise and the great lend their aid and advice," one of their songs exclaimed. "Nor e'er their assistance withdraw / Till full-fashioned work at the old fashioned price / Is established by Custom and Law."

With the end of the European war, improved trade, lower food prices, and some short term employer concessions slowed the Luddites down. So did massive repression. Luddism, the British historian E.P. Thompson wrote in 1966, was "a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism," and the powerful responded without restraint as well.

Give the Luddites some credit for effective organizing, at the least; it took the biggest army the British government had ever assembled in response to a domestic uprising to stop General Ludd and his followers: 12,000 armed men—more than some of the divisions sent to maintain control over India.

Are we all Luddites now?

So can modern mobile warriors consider themselves descendants of this cause? If you are reading this essay on your laptop or iPhone, chances are that you aren't an unemployed weaver staring starvation in the face. You may be intimidated or annoyed by Twitter, Facebook, or the latest mobile phone application, but that doesn't make you a Luddite. The stocking artisans of early nineteenth century England had nothing in common with our daily anxieties about devices unimaginable in their time.

On the other hand, many people today still fear a world in which technology and the free market both run rampant without any oversight from "the wise and the great" (or from the rest of us, for that matter). To that extent, we can claim at least a strain of Luddite ancestry.

But only a strain. Let's be grateful that we live in a more open society where we can debate labor and technology problems via peaceful and democratic means, and remember General Ludd's Army as the product of a time when others couldn't do the same.

"Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, His feats I but little admire. I will sing the Achievements of General Ludd, Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire."

Matthew Lasar
Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Emailmatthew.lasar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@matthewlasar

120 Reader Comments

My relatives several generations ago were weavers in the Northwest of england who made the trip in to Blackburn to work the mills when the small workshops were dying out. (So I'm really getting a kick... Crap, wrong site) I wonder now if they ever smashed anything on their way.

I do know that the milltowns they moved to were pretty much hell. Not only were the people paid almost nothing by the mill-owners , they then had to pay the same mill-owners for the right to live in the tiny rowhouses with 10 relatives, and the walls in those towns are still to this day black with the coal-soot they breathed every day.

Without reading the article, and off the top of my head, they were followers of one Ned Ludd, and they went around wrecking (milling ?) machinery out of fear that it would destroy their livelihood. They've become synonymous with people who really don't understand or want technology, which isn't really a fair description of their original aims.

I remember having a couple of paragraphs about them in school history lessons of the Industrial Revolution.

Who the Luddites were isn't necessarily germane to the modern use of the word. Yes, its modern meaning doesn't fit with who the Luddites actually were, but who cares? Its far from being the only word whose modern meaning is divorced from its original meaning and that doesn't make it modern meaning wrong or strange.

"Let's be grateful that we live in a more open society where we can debate labor and technology problems via peaceful and democratic means, and remember General Ludd's Army as the product of a time when others couldn't do the same."

At the risk of veering too far into politics, this simply doesn't ring true, and you opened the door wide. While we can debate up and down and pretend our vote for this or that reform is meaningful, it's plain for all to see that it makes little difference. We are not shaping economic policy, economic policy is shaping us and the world we inhabit to such a degree that smashing things is probably the only way to actually change our laissez-faire, corporate welfare system of plutocracy. We aren't Luddites, but we probably should be. If the servers that run Wall Street were to grind to a halt, I think we might get a voice back. Might.

Of course all of this is madness, and you know that, so let's not pretend I've said anything that matters. Let's get back to work and water cooler discussions about anglo history. It makes us feel better to know more than our neighbors about antiquated terminology. It sure is great that we can speak our minds.

This article seems to be self-contradictory. You say that the Luddites weren't anti-technology or anti-Capitalism. Yet, you also explain that because their jobs were threatened by technological and marketplace changes, they went around smashing up property, demanding that the government guarantee them work as weavers.

If you *understand* and support capitalism, you realize that change happens, and if technological progress makes your *current* job obsolete, or marketplace changes (like a particular style of clothing going out of fashion), you go find another, different job. You don't demand the government guarantee employment for X thousand weavers, when there is only market demand for a fraction of that many weavers.

I realize that may be easier said than done, and that back then, it was probably even harder to find a new job, but my point is that even if these people were [edit:] not [end edit] *explicitly* against *all* technology, they were against technological change that threatened the jobs that they viewed they had some 'entitlement' to. Nobody has any entitlements to a job - there's only what you can convince others to pay you to do, and if you can no longer convince enough people to pay you what you expect for what you are doing, it's time to do something else, not fight the change through riots and destruction of property.

Originally posted by Jeff S:This article seems to be self-contradictory. You say that the Luddites weren't anti-technology or anti-Capitalism. Yet, you also explain that because their jobs were threatened by technological and marketplace changes, they went around smashing up property, demanding that the government guarantee them work as weavers.

If you *understand* and support capitalism, you realize that change happens, and if technological progress makes your *current* job obsolete, or marketplace changes (like a particular style of clothing going out of fashion), you go find another, different job. You don't demand the government guarantee employment for X thousand weavers, when there is only market demand for a fraction of that many weavers.

I realize that may be easier said than done, and that back then, it was probably even harder to find a new job, but my point is that even if these people were *explicitly* against *all* technology, they were against technological change that threatened the jobs that they viewed they had some 'entitlement' to. Nobody has any entitlements to a job - there's only what you can convince others to pay you to do, and if you can no longer convince enough people to pay you what you expect for what you are doing, it's time to do something else, not fight the change through riots and destruction of property.

Forgive me for sounding snarky, but... You have clearly demonstrated a complete lack of historical knowledge with your comment.Do you know that these people were trained from a young age to do only this one job? Do you know there was no such thing as job training for unemployed weavers? Do you know that there was literally no other work that they could do? All the land was owned by the rich, all the factories were owned by the rich, all of the food was owned by the rich. Where exactly do you think they could go? What jobs do you think they could have gotten? Are you aware of the incredible restrictions the English caste system imposed on the population? These people had no alternative but violent uprising. They were ignored, marginalized and starved.

in postmodern times, Luddites would be synonymous w/terrorists, lol. aaanyways, great article. i've always used it properly and always correct people when they talk about it. thanks for putting it all together in one place =P

When your entire being and ability to survive in your current world is wrapped up in your job, it's hard to see overbearing profiteering businesses take your job and ship it offshore or to some other location with cheaper unskilled labor. Sound familiar? Ought to; it's still going on in just about any job market you would like to mention.

Before you find yourself too strongly on the side of the Luddites against the crushing of their lifestyle, consider whether you've ever proclaimed that the recording industry (or the movie industry, or Microsoft) should just get used to the idea that their business model no longer works. There are fat cats in any industry, but there are a lot of average Joes who depend on those companies for jobs.

It's unfortunate when industries die, especially for the people who are at the bottom. It's even more unfortunate that circumstances are usually such that all companies in an industry become unprofitable at exactly the same time, leading to massive closures rather than occasional hits. That is a pretty good argument for unemployment benefits and grants to the newly unemployed to move to where the jobs are - but smashing the machines isn't going to bring them back to profitability. It just makes sure that instead of half the people losing their jobs, all of them do.

Originally posted by JediFonger:in postmodern times, Luddites would be synonymous w/terrorists, lol.

They were, really, although they had a very concrete and real threat to their own livelihoods in mind when they were active nothing like the nebulous crap(tm) that modern-day self-proclaimed anarchists or "anti-globalist" protesters claim as an ideology.

The world was an entirely different place then, and being out of work in Ned Ludd's day carried a very real possibility of starving to death. There was nothing like the modern welfare state to fall back on, and the "poorhouses" were utter hellholes filled with the truly desperate.

Originally posted by Jeff S:If you *understand* and support capitalism, you realize that change happens, and if technological progress makes your *current* job obsolete, or marketplace changes (like a particular style of clothing going out of fashion), you go find another, different job. You don't demand the government guarantee employment for X thousand weavers, when there is only market demand for a fraction of that many weavers.

I think you mixed up words capitalism and exploitation. Your example might be relevant today but that's not the kind of workers rights and opportunities people had two centuries ago.

So a real Luddite today would be saboteurs, really, in an attempt to save their way of life.

Yep, that is why the word rarely applies. For instance, the greatest fear many people have today is that their job will beoutsourced to people in another country, like India. Unless you want to travel to India and destroy either the company's equipment or people, you cannot follow in General Ludd's footsteps. I know few people would want to travel to India to blow up a PC, much less kill a person. What was somewhat acceptable in 19th century England is much less tolerable today.

This reduced many parts of artisan England to near starvation; in response, weaver masters made the same blunder that farmers of the time often made. They overproduced, skimped on quality, and embraced labor-saving machines—which in turn cut the wages of thousands of stocking makers and put more of them out of work.

I have to question whether such behavior can be considered a "blunder" rather than an inherent characteristic of competitive markets. When demand falls, prices fall and producers cut quality to reflect the new lower price. If anything the "blunder" was in not mechanizing earlier when demand was higher so that the cost of machines could be amortized over more sales and the people whose jobs were replaced would have longer to find new employment.

This is why "luddite" has a negative connotation. There is no 'losing' jobs to mechanization. The world has two possible states: Either there is demand for something that can't be done by machines, in which case you can get a job doing that, or there is nothing that can't be done by machine and we all live in luxury doing whatever we want while the machines do whatever needs to be done that nobody else wants to do. You can't even argue that we only need a given number of people to do whatever arbitrary things haven't yet been mechanized and so not everyone can get a job doing those things, because a machine to do that work doesn't exist, which means there is demand and a job for someone to build a machine that does it.

There are only two 'problems' with this: The first is that whatever job machines can't yet do may not pay as much as your previous job. This is what we call tough luck. The second is that you may not be qualified for the new job. This is why we now have public education, and to the extent that it isn't sufficient for this purpose, we should look to fixing the public education system rather than fouling the wheels of the economy with any sort of "they took our jerbs" protectionism.

quote:

Do you know that these people were trained from a young age to do only this one job? Do you know there was no such thing as job training for unemployed weavers? Do you know that there was literally no other work that they could do? All the land was owned by the rich, all the factories were owned by the rich, all of the food was owned by the rich. Where exactly do you think they could go? What jobs do you think they could have gotten? Are you aware of the incredible restrictions the English caste system imposed on the population? These people had no alternative but violent uprising. They were ignored, marginalized and starved.

And no one is denying their plight. But let's not get the solution wrong here. The solution is "society will pay anyone's room and board and educational costs as long as they pass their courses." The solution is not "technology is bad, restrict it" or any sort of "protecting jobs" plan in general.

Nice essay. It makes me wonder though if the same thing can't be accomplished in a more peaceful manner in todays society. The article is relating the 1800's luddite thing (can we call it a "movement" actually?) to technology today, so instead of a violent upheaval we simply stop buying.

I remember in (or around) May 2001 seeing something on the local PBS channel about the economy then and how it was the first year that supply dictated by corporations decided consumer spending and the market place instead of consumer demand, I thought that interesting. We obviously lost something along the way if thats true. It means that corporations would control what the consumer buys instead of the consumer demand dictating corporation output of supply to meet the demand. It seems, if thats true, there was a very quiet coup in which coporations now control the consumers pocketbook instead of the other way around, sort of a luddite coup in reverse with control moving away from the consumer (the worker) and shifting towards the corporations (the employer). So to get back that consumer control we stage our own coup and simply stop buying every little thing because the hype promises that it has an app for picking your nose or something, then we will be luddites.

If a person walks into a hardware store, sees a tool he really likes, then rubs a lamp to get his genie out, tells the genie to make him an exact copy of that tool by pointing to it, and teleports that tool to his garage... then walks out of the shop without buying anything. Would that be stealing as well Mr. Moron award #2?

And i dont have a problem with words like theft, stealing, etc as long as they are used correctly.

E.g: - He reported the theft of his car to the police- She was stealing mangoes.

Well, one of the more fascinating things about language is the way perceptions and meanings change over the years. The Luddites weren't the explicitly anti-technogical group we see them as today, but more a type of early unionism such as occurred in Briton and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in direct opposition to unbridled Capitalism supported by direct government intervention. cf the Wobblies and the No Nothing parties.

Originally posted by Xanrel:The world has two possible states: Either there is demand for something that can't be done by machines, in which case you can get a job doing that, or there is nothing that can't be done by machine and we all live in luxury doing whatever we want while the machines do whatever needs to be done that nobody else wants to do.

This second state requires a pretty significant societal shift, though: the ability to live in luxury doing whatever we want without generating income through our labor (including management skills in "labor" for this purpose). If that second state comes to pass, it suggests the end result of the Industrial Revolution is the end of Capitalism. And actually, it's the end of any economic system that posits value being derived from labor, so we're not talking about shifting to some Marxist utopia, either. We're talking about something completely new.

With respect to the article, I think it's important to keep in mind that what the Luddites were fighting against was almost as significant a shift as the theoretical one being described above: it was the start of the Industrial Revolution, the start of the most significant shift in human history--there is no other inflection point before that at which the world changed so dramatically. Marketers today toss "this changes everything" about cavalierly, but this was when everything really did change. It's very easy to write them off as "standing in the way of progress" and not understanding the wonders and glories of capitalism, but this is when modern capitalism really *started.*

"If you *understand* and support capitalism, you realize that change happens, and if technological progress makes your *current* job obsolete, or marketplace changes (like a particular style of clothing going out of fashion), you go find another, different job. You don't demand the government guarantee employment for X thousand weavers, when there is only market demand for a fraction of that many weavers."

Capitalism, in fact any "ism", does not have an immutable existence. People are underneath and are required for any of these "isms" to operate. If they are starving and homeless, not only is the particular 'ism" invalid, it doesn't even exist.

Today, we should be grateful that feudalism, manorial capitalism, and poorhouses no longer exist in the First World. But we should be vigilant against any rise of analogous entities.

Originally posted by Jeff S:This article seems to be self-contradictory. You say that the Luddites weren't anti-technology or anti-Capitalism. Yet, you also explain that because their jobs were threatened by technological and marketplace changes, they went around smashing up property, demanding that the government guarantee them work as weavers.

If you *understand* and support capitalism, you realize that change happens, and if technological progress makes your *current* job obsolete, or marketplace changes (like a particular style of clothing going out of fashion), you go find another, different job. You don't demand the government guarantee employment for X thousand weavers, when there is only market demand for a fraction of that many weavers.

A more modern day comparison for the Ludditte movement would be the auto unions attempting to keep robotic assembly lines out of auto factories. They weren't anti-tech or anti-capitalism as much as they were anti-'impacting my job security'. This is a normal response for almost everyone, regardless of how pro-capitalist/technologist you are. It's the rare individual who is willing to sacrafice their own happiness for either of those ideals.